Clinical and psychopathological analysis of emotional and cognitive disorders in patients with type II diabetes

Abstract

The psycho-emotional state has the most significant effect on the clinical picture and course of diabetes of any type. According to many researchers, it is known that patients with diabetes suffer from depression almost three times more often than patients without it. When the patient has symptoms of depression, his emotional state is disturbed, which quite often leads to the patient's refusal of the prescribed necessary treatment, and eventually decompensation of the somatic state occurs. In turn, it causes new episodes of depression, which requires the use of psychotropic drugs and psychotherapy. A comprehensive clinical-psychopathological and psychodiagnostic examination of 82 patients with type II diabetes of moderate and severe forms was conducted. The average duration of diabetes was (7.9±5.2) years. Emotional disorders are represented by anxious, depressive, astheno-hypochondriac, hysteroform variants of psychopathological symptoms. Cognitive dysfunction is a frequent complication of type II diabetes. It is associated with both the age-related aspect of the disease and the pathological dysmetabolic cascade that forms basis of the pathogenesis of diabetic encephalopathy development. Cognitive decline in type II diabetes has a mixed (vascular-degenerative) nature and is characterized by complaints of decreased working capacity, and is marked by a decrease in memory, auditory-speech and visual modalities, slowing of thinking, decreased concentration of attention, absent-mindedness, inability to focus on performance of a certain task for a long time. The analysis of cognitive functions using the MMSE method showed that the examined patients had mild or moderate cognitive impairments in the form of a decrease in verbal memory, a decrease in the speed of calculation operations, difficulty in orientation, and a decrease in indicators of the perceptual-gnostic sphere. Keywords: cognitive disorders, emotional disorders, metabolic disorders, depression.